Tag: Celtic

Scottish club football’s top man, Neil Doncaster, has little other than nominal occupation in common with slimy sexist Richard Scudamore. Both are English and league chief executives. But Doncaster, the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) boss, now has the opportunity to fashion another similarity, the ability to get away with just about anything. Scudamore, we now know, can do what he likes, how and to whom he likes. Doncaster tried this in 2012, bending over backwards, sideways and eachways to keep Rangers in the Scottish Premier League (SPL) after their liquidation was confirmed. However, more Doncaster machinations recently emerged. On May 16th the “Celtic Research” (CR) twitter account patiently – 140 characters-at-a-time – told previously unpublished tales of the November 2011 SPL broadcasting rights deal – a hurriedly-signed extension to the existing five-year deal signed with SKY and ESPN in July 2009. The deal attracted controversies – especially a clause guaranteeing four Rangers/Celtic “Old Firm” games, which Doncaster claimed was in existence for a decade. Doncaster has not revealed the precise date of its introduction, however. CR also revealed the SPL’s, now the SPFL’s, subsidies to ESPN to show Rangers games. When SPL and Scottish Football League (SFL) clubs voted a replacement Rangers into Scottish club football’s bottom tier in July 2012, Doncaster and the SPL made it more financially viable for ESPN to transmit Rangers games. The first...

Phew. When a club is £36m in debt, stoppage time winners against resilient Kazaks might have more than just its manager re-enacting the Olympic 100 metres hurdles final (well, OK, maybe the slowest of the heats) down strips of open Glasgow land. Try as I might, I can’t quite picture chief executive Peter Lawwell leaping about the place after Celtic qualified for the “lucrative” Champions League group stage. But if Celtic’s long-term financial challenges are as stiff as many Rangers fans have been suggesting this week, then Lawwell will have felt like doing so. After Celtic’s mediocre performance in Kazakhstan, the twin spectres of Champions League exit, and the relatively pitiful financial compensation of the Europa League group stages, loomed large over Celtic Park. Fortunately, it turned out to be a cunning, almost master, plan to add to the Celtic coffers. The prospect of seeing Celtic overcome a two-goal deficit on another “glory night” of European football would, the plan went, put an extra 10,000 on the gate. Such nights are exhilarating, let me assure you from the personal experience of seeing Celtic beat Cologne using that modus operandi, ulp, twenty-one years ago. And if the Kazaks’ pre-match traditional sheep slaughter was banned, they won’t have a clue how to defend…and it won’t matter that Celtic haven’t a clue how to defend either. Especially long throws. The plan, I think,...

Apparently, last Saturday, I and hundreds of others went on a hooligan rampage and “destroyed” the West London suburb of Brentford, while attending a pre-season ‘friendly’ between weakened sides from Brentford’s League One club and current Scottish champions, Celtic.

As slightly cumbersome Celtic centre-back Efie Ambrose got another indeterminate body part in the way of another intricate Barcelona passing move, my shredded nerves were joined by an extra sense of unease, as I thought of Chelsea. Celtic’s rearguard action in the Nou Camp on October 23rd was almost universally praised and manager Neil Lennon’s team were deemed heart-breakingly unlucky to lose in the 94th-minute. But even then, I found it impossible to entirely concur. It wasn’t just because I didn’t think Celtic kept the ball well enough on the nine or so occasions they got possession (striker Gary Hooper miscontrolled one pass simply because he momentarily failed to recognise the round thing hurtling towards him, not having seen it for so long). It was also because I had derided Chelsea as “lucky” and unworthy when they used the self-same “backs-to-the-wall” tactics to win their Champions League semi-final in the same stadium just six months previously. And I derided them as luckier and less worthy when they repeated the “trick” to become the unlikeliest of European club champions in the Munich final 26 days after that. Chelsea received unkinder reviews because they had the talent to play an altogether more expansive game and chose not to; and because they are more generally disliked for any number of other reasons (which would take a whole article to detail). But they overcame Barca...